Shadow Vigilantes

by Paul H. Robinson

  Below are four instances of vigilantes trying to deal with a drug-use epidemic that they see destroying their community but that the criminal justice system seems unable or unwilling to address. None of these four groups appear to be acting out of personal self-interest. Their motivation appears to be saving their neighborhood and the vulnerable people living there.

  But even when vigilantes are morally justified at the start, once the bright line of lawful conduct has been crossed, it is not so easy to know where to stop if the first efforts fail. Being a little more aggressive is a natural response, but, having already broken the law, it is easy for a series of “a little more” to go too far.

  REVEREND DEMPSEY FIGHTING THE 1960S HARLEM HEROIN EPIDEMIC

  Reverend Oberia Dempsey, pastor of Upper Park Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem, New York, in 1962, is troubled by the escalating violence and human misery caused by the growth of the narcotics trade in his neighborhood. In his view, Harlem is overrun with at least forty thousand dope addicts, and the authorities are indifferent to removing the drug pushers that cause so much damage.1 “Citizens fear to venture out after dark,” Dempsey says. “Church members are afraid to go to their meetings at night. The law seems to be in the hands of the muggers and robbers. There's panic among the people.”2

  He sees the pushers’ dealings and the officers’ apathy as a direct affront to African American freedom and civil rights. “There are forces still bent on keeping Afro-Americans down,” he warns, and the drug game is a conspiracy to do just that.3 In response, he forms the Anti-Drug Committee of Harlem, based out of his church, focusing on advocacy and grassroots campaigns.

  These initial efforts include a 1962 rally of black associations, church groups, and other community organizations to protest the police and their ineffectiveness in dealing with Harlem's destructive drug problem. Dempsey also hangs banners outside his church; some read, “all dope peddlers and gangsters get out of harlem & new york city.” Others plead with authorities to “return harlem back into the hands of decent people.”4 Dempsey thinks increasing awareness of Harlem's plight will provoke an official response.

  The groups’ activities have a limited effect, however—on the pushers and on the authorities. By 1965 Dempsey has given up his nonconfrontational approach in favor of a more aggressive, militant solution. He transforms his group into a vigilante patrol consisting of community members, including seven former police officers. Many of the members carry guns on patrol, with Dempsey using a .21-caliber revolver. The “pistol packin’ pastor” brands his activities Operation Confiscation, the newest initiative consisting of two hundred citizen patrol members committing to “watch for pushers, summon police, and where they are not forthcoming immediately, make citizen arrests.”5

  The group harasses suspected dealers and encourages residents to go after pushers. If anyone has problems with the dealers and is afraid of reprisals for reporting them to the police, Dempsey tells that person to let him know. He will deal with the problem.6

  Dempsey's efforts go beyond his confrontations with drug dealers. Dealers and cops are only part of the problem. The reverend also blames local landlords—he routinely refers to them as slumlords—for their refusal to install effective locks on apartment doors, which he believes contributes to the success of the drug dealers. Dempsey calls on community members to withhold rent from any slumlord who fails to act in combatting the drug trade.

  In 1969 Dempsey petitions Robert Morgenthau, New York's US attorney, demanding, “If something isn't done immediately, people are going to arm themselves. There's going to be a lot of bloodshed.”7 Dempsey advocates for stricter penalties for drug dealers, including “death by firing squad” for anyone trafficking dope.8

  Dempsey's demands reverberate throughout the community. A young social worker at the time tells a reporter that the most effective way of dealing with the community drug problem is to “kill the pusher.” This is already happening, according to the social worker, but the police and news media simply report the homicides as dealer-on-dealer violence. “The word is seeping through black ghettos,” the reporter observes, “that vigilante action—up to and including ‘elimination’—may be the only way to halt the growing use of heroin among black youths.”9

  By the early 1970s, Dempsey has succeeded in gaining national attention. Ebony magazine interviews him in 1970, publishing an article entitled “Blacks Declare War on Dope.”10 Dempsey's efforts and newfound popularity make him a likely target for retribution. After a drug gang attacks him in 1971, he vocally encourages all citizens to arm themselves. “People in Harlem,” he says, “should find the heaviest baseball bats around or any other type of weapon that's sold legally to ward off those hoodlums.”11

  The reverend's efforts, and the rising crime problem in the wider New York City area, ultimately spur local politicians to action. By 1973 New York is shifting away from its prior position of relying on treatment to deal with the drug epidemic and its associated violence. Officials finally respond to Dempsey's pleas with the enactment of the now controversial Rockefeller drug laws, mandating severe sentences for mere drug possession.12 Harlem's neighborhoods have run out of patience with the local drug problem and welcome the harsh penalties for anyone involved with the narcotics scourge.

  A HYSTERICAL RESPONSE? THE ROSA LEE STORY

  Reverend Dempsey and his supporters are obviously fearful of the effect of drugs in their neighborhood and outraged at the official inability or indifference that lets the problem grow. Are they hysterical, fighting an imagined problem or exaggerating its harmful effects?

  Consider the human stories that they see in their neighborhood each day multiplied a thousand times over as drugs take in one neighbor after another. Those neighbors then open the door for others to follow in a sad, endless cycle.

  Rosa Lee Cunningham, a mother of eight from Washington, DC, was born into poverty and survives mainly on welfare.13 Even though Rosa Lee has sold heroin for many years, she has only recently started using.14 Rosa Lee quickly becomes hooked and develops an expensive habit that demands to be fed from the family's already small resources.15

  To finance her addiction, Rosa Lee resorts to stealing and hustling. She teaches her children how to shoplift. Rosa Lee also resorts to prostitution. This may be how she contracts HIV, which later develops into AIDS.16

  Rosa Lee regularly shoots heroin alongside four of her children, sharing intravenous needles with them. Three family members work as prostitutes, and they all share needles. It is no surprise that HIV spreads among the Cunningham clan and thus potentially to their clients. Two of her children eventually develop full-blown AIDS.17

  Besides funding her children's drug addictions, Rosa Lee also involves them in the drug trade itself. Rosa Lee runs illegal “oil joints,” places where heroin addicts can buy or inject themselves with heroin, sharing unsterilized needles.18 She employs her five-year-old granddaughter to do the legwork in some heroin deals.

  The vast suffering of her family speaks to the impact of drugs. Her husband is beaten to death with a hammer by a woman with a cocaine addiction with whom he had had a relationship. Of Rosa Lee's six children who become addicts, one dies from AIDS, and three others end up incarcerated. Her fifteen-year-old grandson, Rico, is killed in a drug-related shooting. Rosa Lee dies from AIDS complications.

  Multiply the Rosa Lee story by thousands, and they depict a neighborhood in serious trouble. Reverend Dempsey and every other civic-minded person had reason to be afraid. Heroin use exploded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Reverend Dempsey was trying to salvage his neighborhood. Most drug users started between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, and half were addicted within two years.19 This “heroin generation,” as it is called, is estimated to have included somewhere between eight hundred thousand and four million people.20

  THE 1980s COCAINE EPIDEMIC

  In the late 1980s came the explosion in the use of crack cocaine. Statistics from the period show that 83 percent of
arrestees in Manhattan tested positive for cocaine use, as did 65 percent of those in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and over 50 percent of arrestees in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Birmingham.21 A 1990 Philadelphia study found that 81 percent of males and 78 percent of females arrested tested positive for drugs, most often cocaine.22

  The effects of drugs on crime can be staggering. In Philadelphia in 1991, police reports indicate that narcotics are involved in 50 to 70 percent of all crimes.23 In a Baltimore study, the average addict committed crimes on 248 days each year.24 The same study revealed that 243 of the male addicts each committed an average of two thousand offenses over an eleven-year period; taken together, the group was responsible for five hundred thousand crimes.

  But the damage from drugs goes beyond its effect on crime. It has been reported that 70 percent of all child abuse and neglect cases involve substance abuse by the parents.25 Half of all pediatric AIDS cases result from injection drug use or sex with injection drug users by the child's mother.26 Thirty percent of all traffic fatalities involve drug use.27 Two million people in 2010 went to emergency rooms for situations brought on by illicit drug use.28 Every year, forty-five thousand cocaine-exposed babies are born.29

  The overall societal costs of drug abuse are staggering, and they continue to grow each year. In 1998 the total cost to taxpayers nationwide was $373 billion. By 2000 the cost had grown to $484 billion, which means that on average every American taxpayer is paying $500 a year for the costs associated with illegal drug use by others. This includes $61 billion a year for crime and criminal justice costs, $11 billion a year for added healthcare costs, and $120 billion a year in lost productivity.30 And the problem continues to grow. In 1979 just over 7,000 deaths were attributed to drug-induced causes; by 2011 the number had grown to 43,544.31

  Against the background of rampant drug use and its destructive effects, the outrage and fear of Reverend Dempsey's supporters may seem well-founded. One can see how their frustration with the system's failure to stop the destruction of their community by drugs and drug dealers could provoke them to action.

  One can also imagine their dilemma when their initial efforts are not effective in stemming the threat. Should they push a little harder? Should they perhaps step a bit further over the law's line of authorized conduct to see if that might be enough to solve the problem that the system seems helpless to solve? To them, the social contract seems to have been clearly breached. How far can they go to take care of the problem themselves?

  Reverend Dempsey's struggles with Harlem's 1960s’ heroin problem are replayed for crack cocaine in the 1980s. But the groups in these instances—in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore—each take different paths in addressing the problem. The community group in Philadelphia, for example, takes a somewhat more aggressive approach than Reverend Dempsey.

  HERMAN WRICE BATTLING DRUGS IN WEST PHILADELPHIA

  The Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia is hit hard by the crack cocaine epidemic.32 An economically depressed area known as the “Bottom”—40 percent of its population survive below the national poverty line, and its infant mortality rates are among the worst in the country—Mantua has an assortment of abandoned houses taken over by local drug dealers and their customers. The dealers and addicts drift through the neighborhood, leaving syringes, glassine bags, and other paraphernalia in parks that a few years earlier were the province of small children. But the makeshift crack houses bring more than just noise and blight. They usher in increased crime and introduce more young people to the drug trade, often starting at eight and nine years of age. The open criminality and increasing decline of the neighborhood is met with the unwillingness of officials to do what is needed to stop the slide.

  In 1986 Herman Wrice, an African American who has successfully run rehabilitation programs for drug addicts in other states, moves back to his home city of Philadelphia. Wrice, a former gang member until his wife was almost killed in a shootout, advocates for direct community involvement in stopping crime. Instead of continuing to wait for the police or the city to take action, Wrice suggests that neighbors as a group confront the criminals, especially the drug dealers. Although he starts by running a Mantua sports league, hoping to get youth involved in something other than drugs, he quickly realizes that more is required. Fed up with the drug dealers’ influence over the neighborhood's youth, he forms Mantua Against Drugs (MAD) to put his philosophy in action by confronting drug dealers and driving them out of the community permanently. “Stand up to them,” he believes, “and they'll leave.”33

  After recruiting a group of concerned residents, Wrice and his MAD organization begin to target known crack houses. In large groups, and wearing the group's trademark white hard hats, members picket outside the drug dens and attempt to block customers from entering. Sometimes they spend the night in front of the crack den singing and chanting to embarrass the occupants and remove any pretense of their existence being unnoticed. “Up with Hope,” they yell out. “Down with Dope.”34 The confrontational methods sometimes provoke violence—shoving matches and a few brick-throwing battles.

  Another MAD tactic that turns out to be quite effective is to pressure utility companies to cut service to the crack houses. When the dealers and their clientele leave, the group quickly boards up the houses to prevent reentry. In those cases where police do arrest drug dealers, MAD members attend their bail hearings. They commonly interrupt the defense counsel's presentations and even try to intimidate the locally elected judges into setting higher bail. MAD also makes wanted posters of local drug dealers. The group selects a different dealer each week—their “Dealer of the Week”—and fills Mantua with the lucky person's face.35

  As the group's successes become known, similar antidrug groups form around Philadelphia, often working together in larger numbers to rally and march in areas known to be drug-trade hotbeds. In one incident, calling themselves the United Neighbors Against Drugs, twelve of the city's antidrug groups, including MAD, amass three hundred people to march down Dauphin Street, a road surrounded by blocks of graffiti-spray-painted buildings, stripped-down cars, and collapsing row houses, with drug pushers roaming freely.36 The drug-ravaged street is the type of waste that Wrice wants people to take notice of. As Wrice put it, MAD will “march all over this city” to fight the scourge of drug dealers.37

  MAD's efforts seem to pay off, perhaps in part because they eventually embarrass local authorities into taking the drug problem in Mantua seriously. The 1,644 felonies reported in Mantua in 1989 drop by 40 percent by 1993.38

  Wrice sometimes took a short step over the line of legality to get the results that he got, but what if a longer, more aggressive step over was required? Consider the situation facing antidrug community groups in Detroit.

  Fig. 6.1. A mural tribute to Herman Wrice, 2006. (Photo by Jeremy Burger, 2006. Mural by David McShane and Eurhi Jones)

  BURNING CRACK HOUSES IN DETROIT

  Heavily armed gangs willing to push the drug trade with brutal and bloody violence accompany the crack epidemic in 1980s Detroit.39 The crack houses bring the predictable uptick in crime but also common, random gunfire. The neighborhoods most affected are areas where kids once played pickup baseball on side streets and where residents would sit on their front steps trading gossip. After the gangs move in, venturing outside is limited to only essential outings.

  Outraged at the failure of local authorities to deal effectively with the problem and the toll it is taking on families, two local men, Angelo Parisis, an unemployed landscaper, and Perry Kent, an unemployed mechanic, organize an effort to get the police's attention. They campaign to persuade authorities to rid the area of open criminality, but the effort is futile. The police largely stay away, and the crime continues.

  The duo decides the community must confront the gangs themselves. But while the confrontational chanting and singing worked well in Philadelphia, here it might be more likely to result in gunshots than fleeing drug dealers. After discussio
ns among concerned neighbors, a new course of action is decided upon: to burn the crack houses down. Residents take up a collection to buy canisters and gasoline. Parisis and Kent take what the community provides them and burn down their first crack house in October 1988.40

  Authorities charge the pair with arson and even consider pressing conspiracy charges against the neighbors who contributed to the fund. In support of the two, a local resident starts a fund to help pay for their defense, noting, “Ninety percent of the people in this block support them. When they set the fire, everybody in the neighborhood knew they were going to do it and they knew why they were going to do it.”41 Even those few neighbors who do not necessarily approve of the method agree that what the men did was beneficial, or, at the very least, they see it as the understandable result of the failure of local officials to fix the problem. As one neighbor put it, “I don't agree with their means…. But I don't want a crackhouse in my neighborhood. They did what they had to do.”42

  The jury agrees with the majority of residents. Despite overwhelming evidence and an acknowledgment that the two men did burn down the house, the jurors refuse to convict the men. Parisis and Kent are acquitted of all charges.

  Other communities in Detroit quickly follow suit. In 1988 approximately one hundred drug-related fires are reported in the city, most of which residents are known to have caused or are suspected of to have caused. Arson is not the only method that proves successful in driving drug dealers away. Neighbors wielding pipes and baseball bats routinely clear crack houses of dealers and druggies by force. These altercations often are a precursor to a fire in the building later that evening.

  Fig. 6.2. Crack houses were burned in many cities. (Courtesy of James Jeffrey, Flickr.com)

  The community responds with overwhelming approval. Passing motorists witnessing crack house bonfires or fleeing dealers often honk their horns in celebration, and crowds of onlookers are known to form and applaud the destruction. In a Detroit Free Press poll, 87 percent of respondents find the actions of community groups justified. A supportive resident has only one regret: “I just wish'd they do it to more houses.”43